


The Man in the Mirror

by aimmyarrowshigh



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Bodyswap, Fluff and Crack, Gen, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-X Factor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-23
Updated: 2013-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-12 17:52:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/814320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry/Louis pre-X Factor bodyswap.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man in the Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer** : We don't own anything. No claim of knowledge or veracity is made towards anyone in the story and no aspersions or claims of character are to be inferred. We have no connection nor permissions from One Direction, X-Factor, Simon Cowell, SyCo Inc., Sony, ITV, or Columbia Records. No libel intended.

** The Man in the Mirror **

**  
_001._   
**  
The first thing Louis noticed, in the hazy half-space between being asleep and being awake, when he was generally unfortunately aware of how hard his morning wood pressed into the mattress and how little time he had before either his alarm clock or the airtime assault of sisters, was that he really needed a haircut.

The long fringe hanging over his forehead tickled even his nose, and that seemed wholly incongruous to Louis because just two weeks ago, he and Stan had gone to get their sides buzzed and the tops evened out for spiking.

Well. Maybe his hair just grew quickly, he reasoned. He rolled over.

And toppled out of the twin bed.

_That_ , Louis thought, in his sleep-hazy mind, was uncalled for. Sure, he had the biggest bedroom of his siblings – the only Tomlinson, in fact, with his own room – but stealing him in the night and depositing him in a twin bed so Lottie could commandeer his Queen felt cruel.

“Vindictive and cruel,” Louis muttered into his elbow. His voice cracked.

Well. Fuck. He thought he had well finished with that bollocks six months ago. This was not shaping up to be a lovely day, not a lovely day at all.

And that was when a pile of fabric landed on his head.

“Get up, lazybones! You’ll be late to the bakery, and I won’t excuse you to Simon again!”

Louis sat up, blinking, and there’s some woman he’d never seen before – pretty, with long dark hair, but very much _not_ his mum – leaning into his room, and it was not his room, it was some tidy orange and brown room with Lord of the Rings posters all over the walls and that was _very much not his red-and-white and messy room_ and _why was he not in his room_ and –

Oh, bloody hell; he had to go to a _bakery_?

**_002._**  
“Help us, help us, help us!”

Harry grunted in pain as knees and elbows and fists tornadoed into his sleeping body, jamming into his ribs and stomach and bladder. Clearly, there was a riot happening in Holmes Chapel and thugs had broken into his house and were beating him up in his sleep.

“Louis! Help us!”

Harry frowned and tried to roll over. _Louis_?

“Louis! Rudolph and Isabella got out and are hiding somewhere! Help us!”

More pummeling. Harry opened his eyes and – that was odd. The pillow was white. He sniffed it. Hair gel and booze. 

Odd.

“Help!”

Harry kicked his foot away from whoever was tugging at his ankle and rolled over properly. Two tiny blonde girls stared up at him with round, beseeching eyes, each pulling on one of his ankles. Only they weren’t his ankles, and this wasn’t Harry’s body. Apparently it belonged to someone called Louis, although Harry had no idea who that could be as he didn’t know any Louis.

“Who are Rudolph and Isabella?” he asked instead of anything else, because that seemed to be the direst issue.

“Louis!” shrieked the girl on the left. “Don’t be silly!”

“They’re _snakes_ ,” said the other impatiently. “They’re hiding and we have to find them!”

Harry moved to rub his eyes with one hand, and noticed that his skin was browner now and his hands smaller. There wasn’t any hair in his eyes, which was a shame, as he’d been taking pains to grow it out to cover his ears. At least this way, he probably had different ears, too.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Where do they normally hide?”

“The shower,” reported the first twin. “But they’re not there.”

“Alright,” Harry said, and pushed the blankets back. Hmm. This body only had two nipples, which was also sort of unfortunate. Not that the other two did anything; they were just good talking points at parties. One of the twins handed him a t-shirt from the dresser and Harry made his new face smile at her before he put it on. “So, erm, snakes like warm places. Did you check the kitchen?”

“No!” chirped the other twin. “Good idea! Come on, come on!”

She grabbed Harry’s hand and started tugging him towards the door, and her twin grabbed the other to help. Harry gamely followed along, because at least he could learn the layout of the house surreptitiously this way, but he looked around the room on their way. Sport trophies. A guitar, that was cool. Empty vodka bottles. Footie posters and oily car babes. Very few books, but a computer, which was exciting.

And a mirror. Harry raised his eyebrows at his new self as he shuffled past – tanned skin, turn-up nose, buzzed and spiky hair, blue eyes. He was fairly pretty, if a bit of a chav. Alright. Well, he could be a sporty chav trying to find lost snakes at half-seven in the morning if he had to be. Probably weirder things had happened, Harry reasoned.

**_003._**  
Louis had no idea what he was doing. First off, he had no idea what he was doing with all this _hair_ , because really, his was short for a reason. He had no idea how to find the bakery, although that turned out not to be much of a problem because this town is the size of a biscuit tin. He was even only a few minutes late.

But big problem: he had no idea what he was doing in the bakery once he arrived. He didn’t know a Battenberg cake from a Swiss roll, and moreover, he had no idea the difference between a Pullman loaf and a wheat braid, a latte and a cafe au lait, or a sausage roll and a sausage bun. He knew when he was eating them, obviously, but he couldn’t exactly go around and take bites of everything before handing it to the customer with a cheery _how’d’you do_.

“What’s up you today, Harry?” asked Jane on the tills as Louis stuck his elbow into a glob of jam atop a thumbprint cookie. 

Louis wiped the jam away from his elbow with a rag. “I just woke up a bit not myself. I’ll be fine.”

“Alright,” said Jane dubiously. “In that case, can you go get the tray of Bakewells from the back and put them in the display?”

Louis swallowed. Bakewells. Easy. They had the cherries on them. Bakewells, he’s eaten a million. “Yeah, sure.”

So of course when he got to the back kitchens, there were four trays of entirely different desserts topped with shining red cherries, and Louis groaned despondently, tearing his hands through this abominable mop of hair.

**_004._**  
Harry found the snakes behind the television, coiled around the warmth of the cords. The little twins shrieked and cheered and hugged him around the waist, and after Harry helped them settle Rudolph and Isabella into their terrarium again under a sunlamp, they dragged him into the kitchen. 

More little blonde girls. More noise. This house was cozy, Harry thought, but very different from his own -- mornings in the Styles-Cox house were tea whistling, light cat feet, the rustle of Gemma’s school books. Harry twinged a little, missing cinnamon porridge, when instead he got a plate of fried eggs with beans and brown sauce. It wasn’t not a bad thing -- he did love a fry-up -- but he missed the quiet of his own house and he missed watching his mum put her makeup on while she read the paper and he missed the way Dusty rubbed her head on his knee while he ate his oatmeal.

“What are you doing today, boo?” asked the woman he supposed must be Louis’ mum. She wasn’t blonde, though.

Harry waffled. “Erm, I don’t know. I’m feeling a bit off.”

She rested her hand over his forehead. “You feel alright. Weren’t you and Stan going to footie tryouts at the field?”

Harry blanched a little. 

**_005._**   
The thing was, Louis just wanted to go to sleep. When last he’d gone to bed he was himself, so maybe this whole day was a very strange dream and if he went to bed again, he could wake up as himself. Even after the debacle of the bakery ( _they’d made him sweep the floor_ ) his day had continued to devolve.

To the point that he was now standing in someone’s back shed, microphone in hand, about to sing in front of other human beings.

Louis loved to sing, and The Rogue had been a good laugh, but he and Stan had been kicked out for having nothing to offer once Jay had banned band practices from her basement after the fire incident. He didn’t know about this body he was in, whom he had gleaned was called Harry and was sixteen and who normally drank his tea with so much sugar that Louis felt ill, but –

Louis wasn’t really sure he even could sing with his own voicebox, let alone controlling an alien one.

“Buck the fuck up, Harold!” jibed a kid Louis had quickly deduced was called Sweeny. He assumed it was a last name, but you never knew. Could be Scandinavian or something. “You look like there’s a bug up your arse. What’s eating you?”

“Nothing,” Louis lied. “I’m fine. Just feeling under the weather, I don’t know if I can sing.”

“Mate,” said another kid with bleached hair, who Louis thought was either Nick or Haydn, “Even if your throat fell fucking out, you could sing better than us.”

Louis feels a little heartened by that, but he’d still rather be at home playing football with Stan (and maybe feeling up Bethaney a little).

“What are we singing?” He picked up the microphone again.

“I found this new band,” Sweeny says, and clicks through his iPod. “Called The Script, I think? They’re sick.”

**_006._**   
“I don’t know what happened, Jay,” Stan said earnestly as he steered Harry – Louis – into a chair. “He went in for a header and just – you’d think he’d never done it before.”

Of course, Harry hadn’t. He’d always wanted to, but he was afraid of hitting himself in the face and breaking his nose. But like, today, he wasn’t in _his_ face, was he? So he went for it.

“Sweetie, look here, let me see how bad it is,” Jay sighed, gently lifting Louis’ mangled face. It sported two magnificent black eyes and the bridge of his nose was swollen. Jay touched it gently and Harry hissed. “Well, I don’t think it’s broken. Thank god for that, at least.” She ruffled Louis’ short hair affectionately. “Can you stop running head-first at things now, then?”

“Sorry,” Harry said, and it would have felt like too much of a betrayal to say _sorry, Mum_. “I just aimed wrong. My whole face hurts.”

Stan trotted back from the freezer and slapped a bag of frozen peas into Louis’ hand. “Traditional cure-all. Shove your face in some peas.”

Harry shook his head, then thought better of it. He did rest the bag of peas on his upturned face, though, and it felt better. He liked Stan a lot – honestly, a nicer best friend than Will; this Louis character seemed lucky – but he would rather have spent the day practicing with White Eskimo than beaning himself in the head trying to play footie.

The coterie of little sisters practically carried Harry – Louis – up the stairs to his room like he was a languishing pharaoh rested on a bed of palm fronds, and Stan followed behind with a big packet of crisps and two bottles of lemonade. Once the sisters had all kissed Louis’ forehead sweetly and fluttered back out the door, Stan fired up the computer and started scrolling through YouTube.

“You didn’t _film_ it, did you?” Harry asked dejectedly. 

“Nah, mate, never,” Stan said. “Well, of course I did, but I wouldn’t put it on YouTube. I’m trying to find – maybe it was at Last.fm. I heard this good EP, some band called The Script or summat? The Cursive Handwriting?”

**_007._**   
After dinner, Louis was lounging on the bed of the tidy, tidy room when the pretty sister – Gemma, he thought – knocked on the doorframe. 

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” He swung around to be sitting right side-up properly again.

Gemma smiled and came to sit on the edge of the bed. She gave Louis a hard look. “Who are you, and what’s happened to my brother?”

Louis’ jaw dropped. “What did – how did?”

“Simon called from the bakery and said you mixed up the Bakewells with jammy tarts _and_ you’ve been talking twice your normal speed. Who are you, and what have you done with my brother?”

Louis shook his head in amazement. “My name’s Louis Tomlinson. I’m nearly sixteen and I’m from Doncaster. I have no idea where your brother is, or even who he is. I just woke up… him.”

Gemma frowned and chewed on the edge of her pinkie nail. “Do you think Harry’s in your body, then?”

Louis just opened his arms and shrugged. “’S possible. I guess anything’s possible.”

“And you didn’t do anything?” Gemma asked. “You didn’t like, anger a fortune teller or buy a mysterious artifact on the side of the road or stand in the smack-center of Stonehenge or anything?”

Louis laughed and shook his head again. “No, nothing.”

That wasn’t quite true. Louis had gone to bed stewing about how The Rogue had kicked him out, when all he’d wanted to do was sing with his best friends and have fun. He had gone to bed wishing that he could even remember why he’d thought music could be something he’d be good at. And now, he’d spent the afternoon helping to rearrange the key of a Beatles cover for his – Harry’s, really, but still – his voice, and he’d been clapped on the shoulder and called brilliant.

Gemma patted him on the arm. “If you’re still in Harry’s body tomorrow, we should try ringing your mobile and see if he’s who answers.”

“Good thinking.” Louis smiled. “Thanks. Have a good night.”

Gemma left the room again, shutting the door behind her, and Louis puttered around exploring as he got ready to go to sleep. He left on that EP Sweeny had shown him earlier as he fell asleep.

**_008._**   
After Stan had finally gone and all four sisters had trotted in and out of Louis’ bedroom to get good-night kisses, Harry lay awake on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. There was no constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars on Louis’ ceiling, and maybe it was childish, but Harry missed his. He and Gemma had posted it up years ago, before they’d moved away to Sandbach and back again, and they’d accidentally mirror-imaged the entire night sky when they read their printouts wrong.

Jay, who was very nice and weirdly like Harry’s own mum, but wasn’t, knocked on the door very quietly, so as not to wake the twins in the next room. 

Harry heaved himself off the bed and picked around the piles of dirty laundry and papers and apple cores and rubbish on the floor. He opened the door, and Jay smiled sadly at his bruised face.

“How are you feeling now?”

“I’m alright,” Harry said. “Just tired, I think.”

“Okay,” Jay said slowly. “If that’s settled, then do you mind telling me where my son is?”

Harry swallowed, and sat down again at the edge of the bed. “I don’t know. I promise I don’t.”

Jay crossed the room like she’d memorized where all of the junkpiles were and sat down beside Harry. She took his hand and held it lightly between her own. “Who are you, and how did this happen?”

“I’m Harry,” Harry said, and his swollen nose felt stuffy like he might cry because it’d been the strangest day of his life and his head hurt terribly and it wasn’t even _his_ head. “Harry Styles, and I’m thirteen and I live in Holmes Chapel in Cheshire with my mum and my sister, and I don’t know how I got here. I just woke up this way.”

Jay looked sympathetic and squeezed Harry’s hand. “Do you know where Louis is?”

Harry shook his head. “Can I have an Anacin?”

“Sure.” Jay squeezed his hands again. “Do you know if Louis’ alright?”

“If he’s in my body, then he’s probably in better shape than I am,” Harry admitted. “I’m not so athletic.”

Jay laughed and tweaked Harry’s ear as though she’d known him his whole life. 

“It’s funny,” Harry said thoughtfully, “But I was just thinking last night that I’d like to be better at footie. Maybe that’s what switched us, although it’d make more sense to put me in Wayne Rooney, I guess. Although if I got injured so bad playing pickup in the park, I’d probably get squashed flat taking on a ball going that fast.”

Jay wrinkled her nose and laughed again. “I can see why you were switched with Louis, if you were. I think you’d make each other laugh.” She let go of Harry’s hands and patted his knee as she stood up. “I’ll get you that Anacin.”

After Jay left the room, Harry lay back on the bed again – he hadn’t just been wishing the night before that he were better at football; he’d wished that he were better at football so he could have a different crowd of friends, ones who were nicer than Will and Ellis and who talked about each other behind their backs less. He’d still want to sing, he thought, but he wanted – he wanted a best friend. A real one, who would throw a half-melted bag of frozen peas at his nearly concussed head just to make him tell a secret.

(So now, okay, maybe Stan thought Louis had weed himself on the school trip last month, but Harry had to come up with something.)

Harry took the Anacin and drank some apple juice and waved to Jay as she left the room again, and he left the EP Stan had found playing quietly on the computer as he fell asleep.

**_009._**   
“Help us, help us, help us!”

Louis grunted in pain as knees and elbows and fists tornadoed into his sleeping body, jamming into his ribs and stomach and bladder. He jerked awake quickly and caught Phoebe around the waist as she clambered around to shake his knee.

“Louis! Help us!”

He pulled both twins into his lap. “What d’you need help with?” There was a throbbing pain in his head. “Oh, god, why does my head hurt so badly?”

**_010._**   
A pile of fabric landed on Harry’s head.

“Get up, lazybones! You’ll be late to the bakery, and I _know_ you were yesterday because Simon rang and said you were nine minutes after your clock and you kept mixing up the pastries. Are you feeling alright?”

Harry sat up and looked around his room – there were his Lord of the Rings posters, his Harry Potter, his Frankie Sandford. It was neat. There was no rubbish on the floor, except a spare tissue which, disgusting; Louis had certainly made himself at home in Harry’s bed, if that was who Harry had traded bodies with.

Oh, god. What if the whole world went awry and some completely third stranger had been in Harry’s bed?

“I mixed up the pastries?” 

“You kept selling Bakewells for tart prices and cost him a small fortune,” Anne reported. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah, Mum. I’m fine now. Sorry, and I’ll apologize to Simon this morning. I was out of my head yesterday.”

**_011._**   
Two years later, Harry looked across the crowd at the O2 Apollo, lights casting everyone’s faces into sharp bas relief and shadow, blue and gold and glitters of green and then, like a magnet, another face turned to look into his.

A familiar face.

[](http://statcounter.com/free-web-stats/)


End file.
